Budget Time Machine

Present-day you meets 10-years-ago you for coffee. Share with your younger self the most challenging thing, the most rewarding thing, and the most fun thing they have to look forward to.

“Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.”—naw, I’m just messing with you man. What is this, 2004? What in the world are we doing at Starbucks with the damn hipsters? You know we don’t like this coffee garbage—look across the street, maybe we can get a Dr. Pepper over yonder.

Ah, that is better. Caffeine is one of the things we need to give up, really. Anyway, I know you’re terrible at taking advice from anyone, and you’re going to go ahead and do your own thing, regardless what I say, right? That’s a character flaw; we’re loaded with ‘em. But I’ve got to warn you what’s coming up…and you need to take this one pretty seriously. Just try to not be so stubborn about this one, all right?

About eight years from now (glances at watch), a little less, you’re going to have a stroke. Enormous high blood pressure, the smoking, the weight…dude, it’s all going to try to kill you, and quickly. I can’t stress this enough…we do survive, as you can see, but a little slower, a tiny bit of speech impediment, less fine motor skill. And damn did we get lucky on that. Don’t fuck with the Fates, or they will smite us.

Get yourself on BP meds right away. And stop the damned smoking, before you’re surrounded by terror and doctors telling you that it just (almost) killed you. Get that weight down, quit that toxic stress-factory of a job (can’t trust those assholes anyway: don’t), and work on becoming a real person again. I mean that.

The most rewarding thing…well, Brad just moved out of the house, doing the first-apartment-and-roomies thang (so far, he’s doing it way better than we did); we’re pretty proud of him, he turned out pretty OK, all things considered. Despite your best efforts to screw that one up, he turned into a functioning human-person. The dude is buff as hell, whipping old-flabbies like us into shape.

The “most fun” thing is kind of a… Well, you know how we are, what we like today and what we like tomorrow changes too quickly, sometimes. Right at this moment we’re having a lot of fun writing and blogging; maybe we’ll be into that one for a good long time, maybe not. It seems too dangerously introspective, on days like today. And it seems too retrospective on other days, you know how boring those “always living in the past” old farts are. But maybe that’s good for us, I dunno. It’s fun, anyway; maybe you should try it earlier.

Cut that hair, you look like crap. Gotta go man, the return ticket’s gonna expire soon. Good luck, go home and kiss your wife, right now!